Euronews visits Next Step Challenge

December 11th, 2018

From Euronews 29/11/2018

Learning together – How one Danish scheme gets big business to help SMEs

Søren Røn is the Programme Director for Next Step Challenge, a Danish initiative linked to the EU’s Scale Up training program, that seeks to help successful European SMEs make the transition from being big fish in small, local ponds to expanding into global markets.

Euronews asked him what are the main advantages of the Scale-up Denmark programme?

“The activities within the Scale-Up Denmark programme for each participating company is both workshops or camps, and activities where we get a full insight into how to actually fulfil your go-to-market strategy for example. It could also be the facilitation of ecosystem meetings with either large corporates that are within the given industry, but also with the cluster organisations and all the institutions. But most of all is this specific training of the participating company with at least 180 hours of business expertise that we give to them. So we train them, within the business area that they are within,” he says.

What do you do to help new businesses grow?“So we can help facilitate these companies also growing within the given sector. So looking at us, the three areas of interest that we have: we can go across that with either the sustainability, we’re looking at sustainability but also looking at digitalisation and we can help the companies grow based on the stronghold position, but also based on the national initiative that scale-up Denmark is.”

What other benefits do the companies participating in the programme get?“What we also do is, we run three centres, we have the opportunity to look between sectors, between industries, and we see that there is something called sustainability that is also driving the daily agenda within this industry. And also digitalisation is something that every industry is looking into. So given that we have three centres, we are able to put some of the companies participating, for example in the experience economy and tourism, to connect them with some of the other corporates, some of the other participating companies in the other industry areas. So that gives us new ideas that give the companies new ideas, and that gives the corporates that are participating, this as well. It gives them new opportunities to look at their businesses at a new level, so it’s kind of like innovation going both from the SME’s to the corporates participating but also going from the corporates to the SME’s.”

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